March 22

Carl Robert Keyes Uncategorized , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Essex Gazette (May 22, 1776).

“STOP THIEF.”

The advertisement had a bold headline: “STOP THIEF.”  Those two words likely attracted the attention of many readers of the March 22, 1776, edition of the Essex Gazette.  After all, the headlines for most other advertisements gave the name of the advertiser in a large font, such as “Nicholas Pike,” “Abel Morse,” and “John Sawyer,” or named a product being sold, such as “Garden-Seeds” and “Lemmons by the Box.”  This advertisement reported on a recent burglary: “STOLEN out of the House of the subscriber living in Seabrook last Sunday night the following Articles … A dark brown Coat, a brown Kersey Great Coat, a black velvet J[ac]ket, a striped cotton and linnen Gown with chintz cuffs; two quilted Petticoats, and one single d[itt]o. and a linnen Shift, with sundry other Articles.”

That was quite the haul.  Whoever stole the black velvet jacket and the striped cotton and linen gown was unlikely to wear both items.  They might have kept some of the stolen goods for personal use, but they likely sold or fenced most of them. Burglars, thieves, and shoplifters devised alternate means of participating in consumer culture during the era of the American Revolution.  Reports of their activities frequently appeared as newspaper advertisements alongside other notices that presented all sorts of clothing, textiles, and housewares imported and sold by merchants and shopkeepers.  Another advertisement in the same issue of the Essex Gazette had a headline that proclaimed, “Four Dollars Reward.”  In it, Israel Adams described the theft of “Four pair of men’s SHOES; two pair men’s Pumps; six pair women’s Pumps, and two pair boy’s Shoes.”  Both advertisements offered a reward for capturing the culprits and bringing them to justice … and both offered a reward for the return of the stolen goods.  The anonymous advertiser from Seabrook seemingly understood that the goods may have been fenced by the time anyone could “take up said Thief and confine him in any [Jail], so that he may be brought to Justice,” but just in case it was not too late “the subscriber” would double the reward for delivering “the Thief and Goods.”

Slavery Advertisements Published March 22, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

Massimo Sgambati made significant contributions to this entry as part of the Summer Scholars Program, funded by a fellowship from the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in Summer 2025.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Connecticut Gazette (March 22, 1776).

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Connecticut Gazette (March 22, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (March 22, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (March 22, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (March 22, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (March 22, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (March 22, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (March 22, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (March 22, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (March 22, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (March 22, 1776).

March 21

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

New-York Journal (March 21, 1776).

“This balsam is sold in bottles … seal’d with my own seal.”

Richard Speaight hawked a variety of patent medicines in an advertisement in the March 21, 1776, edition of the New-York Journal.  He listed Turlington’s Balsam, Anderson’s Pills, Lockyer’s Pills, Hooper’s Pills, James’s Powders, Story’s Worm Cakes, and Stoughton’s Bitters.  All these remedies were so familiar to consumers that Speaight did not consider it necessary to indicate which of them relieved which maladies.  Prospective customers knew them as well as modern consumers know the over-the-counter medications available at local pharmacies.  He sold all of them, along with “an assortment of [other] Drugs and Medicines,” for reasonable prices.

On the other hand, Speaight did devote a significant portion of his advertisement to describing a “CHYMICAL Balsam approved of by some of the best Physicians in London.”  Those practitioners, he reported, considered the balsam “an excellent medicine for coughs, asthmas, those in a consumptive decay, pains in the breast and all rheumatic disorders.”  It supposedly worked to “great effect,” a welcome promise to readers who had tried other treatments without success.

In addition to customers who purchased the balsam for their own use, Speaight also hoped to attract the attention of retails who would stock it in their own shops.  He set the price at one dollar per bottle and four shillings for a half bottle while also making “allowances to those who buy to sell again.”  In other words, he offered discounts for buying in volume.  To avoid counterfeits, he informed the public that bottles of the balsam were “seal’d with my own seal.”  Furthermore, he provided “directions signed with my own name.”  Retailers and consumers alike could refer to those instructions when selling or using the balsam.  For a medicine not nearly as familiar as Anderson’s Pills and Stoughton’s Bitters, a seal and printed directions likely enhanced confidence in the efficacy of the product.

Slavery Advertisements Published March 21, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

Massimo Sgambati made significant contributions to this entry as part of the Summer Scholars Program, funded by a fellowship from the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in Summer 2025.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

New-England Chronicle (March 21, 1776).

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New-England Chronicle (March 21, 1776).

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New-York Journal (March 21, 1776).

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New-York Journal (March 21, 1776).

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New-York Journal (March 21, 1776).

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New York Packet (March 21, 1776).

Advertisements for Common Sense Published March 21, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features

Historians consider Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published anonymously on January 9, 1776, the most influential political pamphlet that circulated in the colonies during the era of the American Revolution.  Written in plain language accessible to readers of all backgrounds, the pamphlet made a bold case for declaring independence at a time that many colonizers still sought a redress their grievances by George III and Parliament.  Paine’s pamphlet played a vital role in swaying public opinion in favor of declaring independence.

Common Sense was an eighteenth-century bestseller, though Paine wildly overestimated how many copies were published, claiming 150,000 circulated in 1776, and historians later made even more dubious claims that American printing presses produced as many as 500,000 copies.  Contrary to those exaggerations, American printers most likely published between 35,000 and 50,000 copies in 1776.  Scholars have identified twenty-five American editions, more than twice as many as any other American book or pamphlet published in the eighteenth century.

Colonizers certainly discussed Paine’s pamphlet … and printers, booksellers, and others advertised it widely.  As a special feature, the Adverts 250 Project chronicles those advertisements, starting with newspaper notices for Robert Bell’s first edition published in Philadelphia and then subsequent advertisements for that and other editions published and sold throughout the colonies.

These advertisements for Common Sense appeared in American newspapers 250 years ago today.

New York Packet (March 21, 1776).

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New York Packet (March 21, 1776).

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New York Packet (March 21, 1776).

March 20

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Pennsylvania Journal (March 20, 1776).

“A TREATISE of MILITARY DISCIPLINE; CALCULATED FOR THE USE OF THE AMERICANS.”

Eleven months after the Revolutionary War began at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, Lewis Nicola distributed subscription proposals for a “TREATISE of MILITARY DISCIPLINE … illustrated by TEN COPPER-PLATES.”  He indicated that the work was “nearly completed, and will be put in the press as soon as a sufficient number of subscribers are obtained.”  Authors and printers often used subscription proposals as a rudimentary form of market research, assessing whether interest merited publishing a book and determining how many copies to print while simultaneously increasing visibility for the project and augmenting demand.  Nicola envisioned a “neat duodecimo volume,” a portable size, but did not affix a price except to say that it “will be fixed as low as possible.”  He expected that other aspects of the manual would convince prospective subscribers to reserve their copies.

For instance, he proclaimed that his manual was “CALCULATED FOR THE USE OF THE AMERICANS.”  Over the past couple of years, especially since the war started, American printers published local editions of a variety of British military manuals, but Nicola’s book, as Douglas R. Cubbison explains, “was one of only two such treatises specifically prepared for the Continental Army at the time.”  Nicola emphasized that he focused on practical matters, including “every thing essential on service” while omitted “those Manoeuvres only for parade and shew.”  Militia training had often been an occasion for socializing and entertainment before the war, but officers and soldiers and the communities they served needed more than fancy formations now that they engaged an enemy rather than gathering on the town common.  Cubbison also notes that Nicola outlined “a unified system of military maneuvers” and stressed that “officers must display forbearance, understanding, and respect for their soldiers.”  In so doing, his manual “anticipated many of the core components of the Baron de Steuben’s more famous and considerably more influential Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States.”

Nicola accepted subscriptions in Philadelphia, as did William Bradford and Thomas Bradford, the printers of the Pennsylvania Journal.  In addition, “Thomas Mifflin, Esq; Quarter-Master General at Cambridge,” also collected subscriptions.  When the subscription proposal appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal on March 20, residents of Philadelphia did not yet know that the British evacuated Boston three days earlier, ending the siege of the city.  The most recent news, printed in both the Pennsylvania Evening Post on March 19 and the Pennsylvania Gazette on March 20, came Watertown on March 11, a description of the “bombardment of Boston” following the arrival of cannon that Henry Knox transported from Fort Ticonderoga in New York.  “‘Tis reported the Regulars are embarking,” the missive from Watertown stated, but the printers had not yet received word that the British had indeed left Boston.  Whatever came next, the war was not coming to an end.  Nicola likely hoped that news from Watertown would entice readers to subscribe for a military manual “CALCULATED FOR THE USE OF THE AMERICANS.”

Slavery Advertisements Published March 20, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

Massimo Sgambati made significant contributions to this entry as part of the Summer Scholars Program, funded by a fellowship from the D’Amour College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in Summer 2025.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Connecticut Journal (March 20, 1776).

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Maryland Journal (March 20, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Journal (March 20, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Journal (March 20, 1776).

Advertisements for Common Sense Published March 20, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features

Historians consider Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published anonymously on January 9, 1776, the most influential political pamphlet that circulated in the colonies during the era of the American Revolution.  Written in plain language accessible to readers of all backgrounds, the pamphlet made a bold case for declaring independence at a time that many colonizers still sought a redress their grievances by George III and Parliament.  Paine’s pamphlet played a vital role in swaying public opinion in favor of declaring independence.

Common Sense was an eighteenth-century bestseller, though Paine wildly overestimated how many copies were published, claiming 150,000 circulated in 1776, and historians later made even more dubious claims that American printing presses produced as many as 500,000 copies.  Contrary to those exaggerations, American printers most likely published between 35,000 and 50,000 copies in 1776.  Scholars have identified twenty-five American editions, more than twice as many as any other American book or pamphlet published in the eighteenth century.

Colonizers certainly discussed Paine’s pamphlet … and printers, booksellers, and others advertised it widely.  As a special feature, the Adverts 250 Project chronicles those advertisements, starting with newspaper notices for Robert Bell’s first edition published in Philadelphia and then subsequent advertisements for that and other editions published and sold throughout the colonies.

These advertisements for Common Sense appeared in American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Connecticut Journal (March 20, 1776).

March 19

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Pennsylvania Evening Post (March 19, 1776).

“Hare’s American best bottled PORTER.”

Robert Appleby apparently specialized in beers brewed locally.  Those were the only products that he promoted in an advertisement that ran in the March 19, 1776, edition of the Pennsylvania Evening Post.  He opened with “SPRUCE BEER” that he brewed himself “in Chesnut-street, between Second and Third streets, two doors from the White-horse tavern” in Philadelphia.  Even if prospective customers were not already familiar with his beer, they could certainly find him once they were in the vicinity of the tavern.  Flavored with spruce needles or buds, this popular beverage helped in preventing scurvy.  Appleby sold his spruce beer in bottles, charging three shillings a dozen, or kegs as small as five gallons.  For the convenience of his customers, he offered delivery “to any part of the city.”

He also distributed beer that he did not brew, “Hare’s American best bottled PORTER.”  That beverage already had quite a reputation in Philadelphia.  Over the past several months, several tavernkeepers placed advertisements to alert prospective patrons when they planned to “open a TAP of Mr. HARE’s best AMERICAN DRAUGHT PORTER,” often associating drinking a brew brewed in the colony (and gathering together to do so) with support for the American cause.  Patrick Meade, for instance, declared that he “expects the Associators of Freedom will encouragement to the American Porter it deserves,” and Joseph Price called on “all the SONS of AMERICAN LIBERTY” to drink it at his tavern at “the sign of the Bull and Dog.”

In addition to his spruce beer and the most famous beer brewed in the city at the time, Appleby also sold “Philadelphia bottled BEER and CYDER, by the grose or dozen,” pledging that “None will be sent out but what is exceeding fine.”  Elsewhere in the same issue, Robert Bell placed competing advertisements for his third edition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and James Chalmers’s Plain Truth, a response that depicted the “scheme of INDEPENDANCE” as “ruinous, delusive, and impracticable.”  Whether or not they purchased those pamphlets, the readers who consumed Appleby’s spruce beer and Hare’s porter likely had animated conversations as they discussed current events.

Advertisements for Common Sense Published March 19, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Special Features

Historians consider Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published anonymously on January 9, 1776, the most influential political pamphlet that circulated in the colonies during the era of the American Revolution.  Written in plain language accessible to readers of all backgrounds, the pamphlet made a bold case for declaring independence at a time that many colonizers still sought a redress their grievances by George III and Parliament.  Paine’s pamphlet played a vital role in swaying public opinion in favor of declaring independence.

Common Sense was an eighteenth-century bestseller, though Paine wildly overestimated how many copies were published, claiming 150,000 circulated in 1776, and historians later made even more dubious claims that American printing presses produced as many as 500,000 copies.  Contrary to those exaggerations, American printers most likely published between 35,000 and 50,000 copies in 1776.  Scholars have identified twenty-five American editions, more than twice as many as any other American book or pamphlet published in the eighteenth century.

Colonizers certainly discussed Paine’s pamphlet … and printers, booksellers, and others advertised it widely.  As a special feature, the Adverts 250 Project chronicles those advertisements, starting with newspaper notices for Robert Bell’s first edition published in Philadelphia and then subsequent advertisements for that and other editions published and sold throughout the colonies.

These advertisements for Common Sense appeared in American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Henrich Millers Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote (March 19, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Evening Post (March 19, 1776).